“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955)

This long story by J.D. Salinger was packaged in 1963 with another long piece, “Seymour, an Introduction,” for the last book he published. With Franny and Zooey, from 1961, they were all Glass family stories, all as written by Buddy Glass. “Raise High” goes lighter on the spiritual / religious extracurricular activities and is essentially a very good wedding-day story. The groom, Seymour Glass, and his bride Muriel are entirely offstage. The wedding has been delayed or called off because of some crisis for Seymour. It’s 1942 and everyone is suddenly in the military. Buddy barely gets a pass to come home to New York City. When he arrives, it’s a sweltering day and wedding attendees are chaotically leaving for the reception. Buddy ends up in a full taxicab that includes the Matron of Honor. Then they are caught in traffic (a passing parade) but they are near Buddy’s and Seymour’s New York apartment, which is air-conditioned. Buddy invites them there, where they can cool off, make phone calls, and sort things out. The story is pleasantly random, full of the energy, strange ways, and grace of special days. It’s interesting to me how, across “Franny,” “Zooey,” and especially “Raise High,” Seymour is more and more manifestly unfit to survive, seemingly a simple soul in some ways. He is also, as a matter of the Glass family saga, given as a wise or even holy man. But a lot of the details here, Seymour’s gross naivete about love and relationships and practical matters, make him out at best as a holy fool. We also know what’s looming in the “Bananafish” story so there is also sadness at the bottom of this great jumble of joy and confusion and peevishness, with let’s call it an epiphany about the meaningfulness of this special day. The title comes from the sister Boo Boo, about whom we don’t know much from the extant Glass stories. It is a typically exuberant Glass / Salinger message written in soap on the bathroom mirror. Boo Boo had been staying there but recently shipped out, forced to miss the wedding. It is this absolute rapturous cheer that I may like most about Salinger in general. He is entirely up to special days—it’s the quotidian ones that tend to give him problems. Writes Boo Boo: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” So sweet I get a cavity—in the clinch, YMMV.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
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Eephus (2024)

I recently recharged the love side of my love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Having followed them closely for weeks and months this past season, and finally suffering the perhaps inevitable result, a baseball movie struck me as just the thing for cheer. Eephus, however, is not a typical sports movie, which of course more often focuses on the escalating drama of a championship run, with lots of rousing and/or tender moments in the last third. See The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rocky, Bull Durham. etc., etc. Eephus has its quotient of sentiment, focusing on the last ballgame played at a field slated for demolition, making way for a new school. It’s Massachusetts, it’s October, and only a handful of spectators are on hand. The players are obvious amateurs, mostly middle-aged and older guys not remotely in physical shape. The pitcher for one side drinks beers between innings and often falls down. The slapstick did not particularly work for me. IMDb classifies Eephus as both “drama” and “comedy,” which in this case feels like a hedge because it’s hard to know what this movie is. It reminded me a lot of pictures like director Wayne Wang’s 1995 Smoke, or director and writer Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, full of random characters saying wry, eccentric things to one another. One odd fellow in the dugout here, a relief pitcher, gives us the full lowdown on the “eephus,” a high-arcing curveball that falls into the strike zone and throws off a batter’s timing. The pitch is extremely slow, clocked under 60 mph, and not used often. I guess it’s a metaphor. But Eephus also has some interesting surprises, such as voiceover narration from master documentarian Frederick Wiseman and a cameo by Red Sox / Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitches an inning. The game is barely tracked as such though we get enough information to understand it’s going into extra innings, which is where the heavy metaphors really start. They play on into the dark, then light the field with their car headlights and play on some more. I came away from Eephus more puzzled than anything, but it’s quite possible I would like it more with another look. It’s that kind of movie.

I Like to Watch (2019)

Emily Nussbaum won a Pulitzer in 2016 for her TV reviews in the New Yorker. This roundup of her stuff—including feature profiles and one or two previously unpublished essays—is at once an eccentric survey primer and an exploration of what has happened to TV so far in this century. She sets the tentpole starting markers at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, feeling called on to defend Buffy at every opportunity and noting that the accepted status of The Sopranos means no defense is necessary—in fact, some skepticism might be called for. She also takes nuanced feminist views into her analyses, which proved notably useful when Me Too rolled around in 2017. Most of these pieces appeared originally in New York magazine or the New Yorker but most of them were reworked at least a little for this excellent compendium. Three groups of reviews are organized by theme (“Girls Girls Girls,” “Breaking the Box,” and “In Praise of Sex and Violence”) and all the rest are essays and/or profile pieces, on subjects such as Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Ryan Murphy, and Joan Rivers. Issues of product placement are discussed alongside full-throated defenses of Buffy and Sex and the City. Perhaps the best piece here is a long meditation on Me Too and bad artists and good art and trying to split the difference. The fact that she is also a recovering Woody Allen fan made me like her even more. TV in the 21st century has become an overwhelmingly vast landscape, with which I am familiar only in relatively tiny parts. She talks about a lot of shows I’ve never heard of here (as do people all over social media, I’m kind of in the dark on a lot of this), many more I’ve maybe meant to get to and know a little, and some things I know well, like Lost and The Leftovers, the Damon Lindelof projects. If she prefers Law & Order SVU to the flagship series, which I don’t, her reasons are clear and not surprising. Ryan Murphy gets one of the biggest profiles at the very end, but he’s one I have tended to reflexively skip past—American Horror Story, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc. I guess he got me with the OJ doc, which was brilliant. I’d say it makes me want to try more by him, except I already did with the first season of American Horror Story. I Like to Watch also promises to be useful because there’s a lot of TV here I hope I can track down.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Greetings From Timbuk3 (1986)

Timbuk3 was a husband and wife act straight outta Madison, Wisconsin—Pat and Barbara K. MacDonald—augmented by a drum machine for the pseudo-trio designation. Their instincts pointed them in rootsy directions, but they had a surprise top 20 hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” It’s basically skinny tie and shades new wave, but the country blues inflections combined with the nuclear anxiety at high levels then (due to Chernobyl and Ronald Reagan joking about releasing bombs) produced something everyone wanted to hear for a few weeks. It was a pretty good joke too. The singer is in college, getting good grades, studying nuclear science. His teacher wears dark glasses, presumably for the intense flash of light that accompanies A-bomb detonation, and now the singer is wearing them too. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find coming back to this album—in memory the hit seemed more like a novelty and most of the rest of the album (except the closer) a lot of half-songs that never much cohered. But my memory was faulty—Greetings From Timbuk3 is way better than I expected. The songs are shaggy and shambolic but they are good. There’s a continuing theme of the brave young couple very much in love and facing down the cruel world together. With barrels of love. Many years later, after moving to Austin and releasing six more albums, they divorced. So it goes. It does not make them any less brave in 1986. Some cynical, vaguely lefty politics are involved too. “Hairstyles and Attitudes” sells the cynicism with homely wisdom and a brief screeching guitar. “Shame on You” is the longest song here at 5:04 and the only one where Barbara K. gets a writing credit. It’s a rap song, the rap is Barbara K.’s, and it’s not bad, with all due disclaimers. The secret gem to Greetings From Timbuk3 is the last song, “I Love You in the Strangest Way,” featuring more updates from the brave couple. But this song has always hit me in the strangest way, so to speak, it's one made for howling along with at night in various states of drunkenness and/or sadness. I wonder how they felt about it then and feel about it now. The whole album is worth checking out—and now, maybe, I will look into the rest of their catalog too.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

La pianiste, France / Austria / Germany, 131 minutes

Director: Michael Haneke

Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek

Photography: Christian Berger

Music: Franz Schubert

Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel

The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.

There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943)

[spoilers] This Robert Bloch story, according to editor David G. Hartwell of the Dark Descent anthology, is arguably his best, which is a pretty big statement about someone who was so insanely prolific and also author of the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. I’m not arguing against it (I still need to read Psycho!), but only, as an ongoing Bloch skeptic (too much hackwork and not enough better than meh, he started early and lived long), raising an eyebrow to hear the argument. In fairness, it might be the best thing I’ve read by him, but “The Hungry House” from The Weird (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) at least rivals it. Bloch’s primary flaw is a broad vaudevillian tendency to crack glib and jokey, all puns and dad jokes welcome. That’s less of a problem here (though it persists) and my interest in the Jack the Ripper story gets me the rest of the way over the hump. I’m fascinated by the case and up for regular reviews of the details, which takes up a portion of this story. Bloch’s semi-vampiric premise is that Jack the Ripper is immortal, committing blood sacrifice to extend his life. He disappeared as Jack the Ripper, media celebrity, but continued to kill. An investigator, an Englishman, has been on the case for years when he approaches the first-person narrator, a Chicago psychiatrist, to enlist his aid, which involves attending a bizarre trendy bohemian loft type of party along with handfuls of Chicago references. The story’s twist is brazenly gimmicky but Bloch gets away with it somehow and the story is considered by many to be a stone classic. It’s fairly a surprise that the narrator, the Chicago psychiatrist, turns out to be himself Jack the Ripper. But you really can’t think about this too much or it all falls apart. The investigator’s interest in the psychiatrist is never really given. Chicago, not to mention the world, is a big place for such happenstance. And why, as the narrator, is he withholding from the reader who he is, other than for a short story effect? In the end this story doesn’t work so well for me. Bloch is interesting because he straddles two major strains of 20th-century horror, starting out as a teenage disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, and evolving into the straightforward dialogue-driven story with a surprise (and/or ironic) ending so popular at postwar midcentury. He is fully the latter here, by 1943. In many ways the story seems designed merely to spring its gotcha surprise, rather than offer any insight about Jack the Ripper or his legend.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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The Long Tomorrow (1955)

This novel from the Library of America ‘50s SF box is by Leigh Brackett. I barely know the name but I see she has a big reputation and, indeed, she is a good writer who can construct a novel (as opposed to all the fix-ups, more common than I knew). The Long Tomorrow features a postapocalyptic scene, set in the US after “the Destruction”—presumably an all-out nuclear war. The idea is summed up in the “30th Amendment” to the US Constitution, which outlaws cities and sets limits on density. The Amish have risen to prominence because they know better how to survive without a lot of the modern technology that has been lost. Religion has returned to prominence along with biblical public policy like stoning as a means of execution. Two boys from a small town (well, small towns is all we’ve got here) are curious about science and knowledge. They want to get to a perhaps mythical place called Barterstown, which honors knowledge according to the legends and rumors. I can’t help seeing a lot of this through the frame of now, and these religious anti-city anti-science folks in charge inevitably made me think of trumpism. The boys eventually escape and make the long journey to Barterstown, which of course isn’t at all what they thought it would be. I should probably shut up now, because I’ve already spoiled Brackett’s work to keep it uncertain in the first half whether Barterstown even really exists. The thing I like best about The Long Tomorrow is simply how well done it is. There are probably better dystopias involving religion, but this certainly merits a look if that’s your thing (Harlan Ellison, say, or Margaret Atwood). It’s not mine so much. My sympathies, here and elsewhere, straddle the religious and antireligious. In this day and age I would have to count myself, in a general sort of way, on Team Antireligious. The religious folks here are pigheaded and can be brutal but they’re not all bad, much as the Barterstown residents are sadly flawed too. Hard to know exactly where, between these two sides, that my sympathies would lie. The careful ambiguity counts as a good thing by my lights. The Long Tomorrow was good enough I’m inclined to track down some more by Brackett,

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Rockabilly Boogie (1956-1957)

I was looking for a 1956 album called Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, listed in The MOJO Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time. Instead, I ended up with this terrific 1989 Bear Family CD: 28 tracks, encompassing all 12 tracks from the original album and all 20 tracks from a 1993 CD release listed in Wikipedia, plus copious notes and scrupulous research you’ll need a magnifying glass to read. The sequencing is weirdly varied across all three. One of my favorites, for example (out of about 28 stellar favorites), is “Rock Therapy” (“I don’t need a doctor, I don’t need a pill”)—track 3 on this album, not appearing on the original LP, track 13 on the 1993 CD. In short, you’re probably best advised to get this Bear Family CD and play it loud and often. I don’t see it on my streaming service, though I might be able to cobble together a reasonable facsimile from tracks available. But why bother when I can just play this CD? I consulted the internet on Johnny Burnette, by searching on “best rockabilly artists.” Burnette, who died in 1964 at age 30 in a boating accident, seems to fall in the lower echelons of the top 10, preceded by names you would predict: Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, etc. More modern names also appear, such as the Stray Cats and Reverend Horton Heat. Johnny Burnette could thus well be a familiar name but still relatively unheard except by the most dedicated followers of rockabilly. I recommend you don’t skip Burnette. This stuff throbs with life, good screams, heavenly backup singers, barbed-wire guitar breaks, and deep thick grooves. On “Touch Me” Burnette even trills like a songbird inside the clatter. Most of the necessities are here: “Tear It Up,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Rockbilly Boogie,” “Lonesome Train (On a Lonesome Track).” “Butterfingers” is a goof, possibly playing on the candy bar’s popularity. “Eager Beaver Baby” might go too far—yes, I think it might. “Midnight Train” is a country jailhouse lament—Burnette obviously had a thing for trains. The last track, “Shattered Dreams,” is all show horns and no guitars as Burnette is called on to belt it out like Bobby Darin. It’s a novelty. Most of the rest is some of the purest rockabilly you may ever hear.

Superman (2025)

I heard a lot of good word of mouth about the latest Superman movie, directed and cowritten by James Gunn, who in 2022 was put in charge of a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise (his “cowriters” here are the original Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who died last century but, as with Bob Kane and the Batman movies, must have finally won an ironclad lawsuit). The word of mouth is warranted—the movie is well worth seeing for any fan of Superman and maybe even for those, like me, now good and sick and tired of superhero movies. Gunn has an intriguing resume. He is also responsible for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and, back in 2010, Super, with Rainn Wilson and then-Ellen Page, which might be the greatest superhero comic book parody ever made. Gunn’s tongue is not as firmly in his cheek with Superman, but the picture is so lighthearted as to be perfectly refreshing, notably with its use of the super-dog Krypto, who is playful here like a dog but has those good old Kryptonian superpowers too. If this dog ever catches a car, woe to the car. Speaking of catching, this boy-scout Superman (David Corenswet) is also caught saving a squirrel in one throwaway scene. That’s how tender his heart is. Superheroes are referred to in this universe as “metahumans” and they are not always trusted, lifting a page from the mutants thing. Superman is set up by enemies as an alien invader and people start grumbling about him. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has a lot to do with it, appearing as a transparently Stephen Miller type, raving about alien immigrants. Pretty obvious, but OK, I will take it in this day and age. We also get a handful of extra superheroes, associated with a quasi-core to the Justice League calling themselves the ”Justice Gang”—the Green Lantern with a blond haircut like Moe’s from the Three Stooges (Nathan Fillion), a version of Hawk Girl (Isabela Merced), Mr. Terrific, new to me (Edi Gathegi), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). At the very least it’s an odd but deeply informed view of the DC universe, such as it is. Another key twist on the usual is finding out early that Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) knows Clark Kent is Superman and they are basically boyfriend / girlfriend. There’s also a pretty good joke about Superman thinking he is authentically punk-rock. I dread whatever comes next because that usually means weighing down all the best stuff with unlikely explanations and doing the continuity dance for the sake of carping fans. Like the 1978 Superman, this one can be thoroughly enjoyed on its own terms and all sequels approached with caution. Better to look at this one more than once—it’s that good.

Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Touki Bouki (1973)

Senegal, 85 minutes

Director/writer: Djibril Diop Mambety

Photography: Georges Bracher

Music: Josephine Baker, Mado Robin

Editor: Siro Asteni

Cast: Magaye Niang, Myriam Niang, Christoph Colomb, Moustapha Toure, Aminata Fall, Ousseynou Diop

In Wolof, the language spoken in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, “Touki Bouki” translates as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which helps to clarify things. The picture can roughly be described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde story crossed with the classic Western story of dissatisfied young folks in the provinces—or, in this case, an African colony of France—trying to make it to the capital—not Dakar, note, but Paris. A lighthearted Josephine Baker song, “Paris Paris Paris,” underlines the point, coming up on the soundtrack whenever Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Myriam Niang) feel the great city and European cultural capital is within their grasp.

Mory owns a motorcycle on which he has mounted a long-horned cow skull. Life in this remote region is mostly about cattle ranching and Mory gets by working as a cowherd. It’s not what he wants to do with his life—that’s more along the lines of being a bohemian. But early scenes in a slaughterhouse set the tone and foreshadow his more likely doom. Though not a large part of the movie, these scenes are almost the first thing we see. They are intensely disturbing, as we witness pathetic cattle as they realize the danger late and fight helplessly. There’s nothing they can do. Touki Bouki is a low-budget affair and these scenes are not simulations, showing actual livestock slaughterhouse deaths (decapitated and bled out) in a little too much detail for me. But it certainly establishes, however playful events shown here may become, that there is always a desperate deadly seriousness behind the impulse to get away.

“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.